Jose Vasconcelos, father of “La Raza” Hispanic racialism Jose Vasconcelos was a very prominent Mexican writer, philosopher and politician. He produced the “La Raza” racialist concept for the mixed race Hispanic peoples, on which the La Raza and Chicano political movements in the United States are based, formalized in his book, “La Raza Cosmica,” published in 1925. In “La Raza Cosmica” Vasconcelos developed a racial and ethnic supremacy concept for Hispanics, similar to the Nazi racial theory but translated for the mestizo (mixed) race.

Many Mexicans knew about it, but the embarrassing information was being suppressed by Mexican society to outsiders. However a Jewish scholar of Latin America, Itzhak Bar-Lewaw, rediscovered that Vasconcelos was a paid Nazi agent and propagandist and re-publicized the information in the 1970’s.